The Reinvention Tour — Who Do You Think You Are?

Someone asked me about the blog last week. A colleague. Friendly, genuinely curious, completely well-meaning.

And I went vague.

I mumbled something about affiliate marketing. About skincare. About commission links and building a side income. All true. All completely beside the point. And then I changed the subject.

Because the real answer felt too big. Too vulnerable. Too much like standing up in a room full of people and waiting to be told to sit back down.

Who do you think you are?

I have been hearing that voice my entire life. It did not start with the blog. It started when I was fifteen.

The Girl Who Sang and Danced Alone

She was funny. Passionate. She loved fashion, drawing, making things, and feeling everything so deeply that living inside her own head was sometimes the only place that made sense.

When nobody was watching, she would sing and dance.

When people were watching, she went quiet and withdrawn.

She could not make her brain do what the classroom needed it to do: sit still, spell correctly, and follow the straight line from question to answer. And the people who were supposed to see her saw only what she could not do.

Her dad told her she would not even get a job cleaning toilets.

Her mum ridiculed her spelling. Focused relentlessly on what she was not rather than what she was.

Nobody named what was magnificent about her.

Nobody except one person.

The Art Teacher

Somewhere during those years, an art teacher saw something. She told this girl's mother that her daughter was so talented that she would be a magnificent designer.

Her mother never passed it on.

I found out as an adult. A throwaway line, no reflection that perhaps it should have been said to me decades earlier, when it might have changed everything.

I remember the feeling. Not quite grief. Not quite anger. The weight of a life that could have been.

The Voice in Your Head

There is something nobody tells you about childhood. The way people talk to you when you are young becomes the voice in your head when you are older. And the voice in your head is the one you tend to believe.

My dad's voice. My mum's silence. The classroom had no framework for the way my brain worked. All of it became the internal narrator I carried into every room, every relationship, every dream I almost talked myself out of before it even began.

That voice does not announce itself. It just whispers. Who do you think you are? Every single time you try to do something that matters.

My Brain Does Not Work in Straight Lines

Here is something I have only recently begun to understand.

My brain does not work in straight lines because it does not think in straight lines.

It thinks in images, feelings, connections, and metaphors. It makes leaps. It finds patterns. It sees the emotional truth of something before the logical argument has even formed.

That is not a stupid brain. That is a magnificent one.

The education system in 1970s Australia had no framework for a brain like mine. So it called me the wrong things instead. And the people at home confirmed it. And a fifteen-year-old girl who was singing and dancing when nobody was watching started to believe them.

When you are told you are stupid for long enough, you do not argue. You absorb it. You carry it. And then you spend the next fifty years waiting to be found out.

That is not imposter syndrome. That is what happens when the first voices you hear tell you the wrong story about who you are.

What I Know Now

My dad was wrong. Spectacularly, completely, irreversibly wrong.

I am sixty years old. I have built a career, launched a skincare brand, and I am building a blog that women read and return to week after week. I am writing a memoir. I am going home to the city that has always felt like home, deliberately and on my own terms.

All of it with a brain that does not work in straight lines.

The art teacher knew what she was looking at. She just never told me directly.

So I am telling myself now. Fifty years late. But here. Clearly. Without apology.

Who do you think you are?

Someone worth listening to. As it turns out. 💛

If This Is You

If you have a version of that fifteen-year-old somewhere inside you, the one who was named wrong, I want you to know something.

The naming was wrong. Not you.

The voice that goes vague when someone asks about your dream, that is not wisdom. That is an old wound protecting itself. And old wounds do not get to decide what you build.

You are not what they named you. You are what you make.

Now go make it. 💛

Have you ever felt like an imposter in your own life? Tell me in the comments. 💛